The Best Conservatories to Visit in the USA, Region by Region
By the Verrière editors · Published on October 15, 2026
In the United States, many big cities have their conservatory, often in the middle of a public park, and botanical gardens and zoos have built spectacular glasshouses. Here is a selection from the Verrière atlas, region by region.
The Northeast
New York, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington: the Northeast holds the great historic conservatories, from the Bronx's Enid A. Haupt Conservatory to Phipps and Longwood Gardens.
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Enid A. Haupt Conservatory
🇺🇸 Bronx, New York, United States · 1899–1902
Saved from demolition by a single philanthropic gift.
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Steinhardt Conservatory
🇺🇸 Brooklyn, New York, United States · 1988
Three octagonal glass pavilions and a 75-metre wing replaced Brooklyn Botanic Garden's ageing wooden greenhouses in 1988.
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Marco Polo Stufano Conservatory (Wave Hill)
🇺🇸 Bronx, New York, United States · 1906–1907
Built in 1906 for the financier George W. Perkins, the glasshouse was rebuilt in 1969, keeping only its original portico.
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Longwood Gardens Conservatory
🇺🇸 Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, United States · 1921
The great conservatory of Pierre S. du Pont's estate, built to dazzle his guests.
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Longwood Gardens West Conservatory
🇺🇸 Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, United States · 2024
The largest construction project in Longwood Gardens' history, with a roof and walls that open according to the weather.
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Phipps Conservatory
🇺🇸 Pittsburgh, United States · 1893
A gift to the city from steel magnate Henry Phipps.
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Frick Greenhouse (The Frick Pittsburgh, Clayton estate)
🇺🇸 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States · 1897
The greenhouse built in 1897 for Henry Clay Frick's estate, designed by Alden & Harlow with the glasshouse builders Lord & Burnham.
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Milton & Catherine Hershey Conservatory (Hershey Gardens)
🇺🇸 Hershey, Pennsylvania, United States · 2016
Opened in 2016 above the 1937 rose garden, it houses what the garden calls one of only 25 indoor tropical butterfly atriums in the country.
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United States Botanic Garden
🇺🇸 Washington, D.C., United States · Garden 1820 · greenhouse 1933
Born from a plant collection brought back by a Pacific expedition.
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Howard Peters Rawlings Conservatory
🇺🇸 Baltimore, Maryland, United States · 1888
The second-oldest public glass conservatory still standing in the United States.
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Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens Conservatory
🇺🇸 Buffalo, New York, United States · 1900
An extremely rare Victorian tri-domed conservatory by Lord & Burnham, set in the heart of South Park.
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Lamberton Conservatory (Highland Park)
🇺🇸 Rochester, New York, United States · 1911
Taken down to its foundations in 2007, the 1911 conservatory was rebuilt as an exact replica, reusing its cypress gutters.
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Lyman Plant House & Conservatory
🇺🇸 Northampton, Massachusetts, United States · 1894–1895
Ten of the twelve houses making up the Lyman Conservatory are open to visitors; the other two are horticultural work spaces.
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The Midwest
Chicago, St. Louis, Saint Paul, Detroit, Milwaukee, Omaha: Midwestern cities built municipal conservatories from the late 19th century on, then spectacular domes and zoo jungles.
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Garfield Park Conservatory
🇺🇸 Chicago, United States · 1906–1908
Designed as a natural landscape, not a collection displayed in rows.
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Lincoln Park Conservatory
🇺🇸 Chicago, Illinois, United States · 1890–1895
Its fiddle-leaf rubber tree, planted in 1891, still rises beneath the glass roof today.
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Climatron
🇺🇸 St. Louis, Missouri, United States · 1960
The world's first geodesic dome to serve as a botanical greenhouse.
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Linnean House, Missouri Botanical Garden
🇺🇸 St. Louis, Missouri, United States · 1882
The oldest continuously operating display greenhouse in the United States, devoted to camellias.
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Jewel Box (Forest Park)
🇺🇸 St. Louis, Missouri, United States · 1936
An Art Deco greenhouse of 1936 whose stepped, vertical glass walls were designed to stand up better to Midwestern hailstorms.
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Marjorie McNeely Conservatory
🇺🇸 Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States · 1915
One of the last great Victorian 'Crystal Palace' greenhouses still standing in the United States.
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Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory
🇺🇸 Detroit, Michigan, United States · 1904
The dome, originally timber-framed, was rebuilt in steel and aluminium in 1949 and reglazed in a renovation completed in 2024.
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Franklin Park Conservatory (John F. Wolfe Palm House)
🇺🇸 Columbus, Ohio, United States · 1895
The only public botanical garden in the world with a signature permanent collection of Dale Chihuly glass.
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Krohn Conservatory
🇺🇸 Cincinnati, Ohio, United States · 1933
An Art Deco cathedral of glass nestled in Eden Park, with its indoor tropical waterfall.
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Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory (The Domes)
🇺🇸 Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States · 1964
Three glass beehive domes, a modernist icon of Milwaukee, now under threat from age.
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Lied Jungle
🇺🇸 Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium, Omaha, United States · 1992
One of the largest indoor rainforests in the world, opened on April 4, 1992, for $15 million.
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Desert Dome (Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium)
🇺🇸 Omaha, Nebraska, United States · 2002
A 70 m geodesic dome, billed as the world's largest glazed one, shelters three re-created deserts.
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Eleanor Armstrong Smith Glasshouse (Cleveland Botanical Garden)
🇺🇸 Cleveland, Ohio, United States · 2003
A glasshouse shaped after quartz-crystal geometry, holding a Costa Rican cloud forest and Madagascar's spiny desert side by side.
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Matthaei Botanical Gardens Conservatory
🇺🇸 Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States · 1964
Designed by Alden B. Dow, this campus conservatory is believed to be the largest university-run display greenhouse in the United States.
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The South
From the conservatory of the Biltmore Estate to the big tropical glasshouses of Texas, the South's greenhouses mix historic houses, botanical gardens and big attractions.
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Biltmore Estate Conservatory
🇺🇸 Asheville, North Carolina, United States · 1895
Vanderbilt's estate conservatory, completed in 1895 at the foot of the walled garden, has a forty-foot palm room and more than five hundred orchids.
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Dorothy Chapman Fuqua Conservatory
🇺🇸 Atlanta, Georgia, United States · 1989
A pair of biomes under glass — rainforest and desert — at the heart of the Atlanta Botanical Garden.
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Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden Conservatory
🇺🇸 Richmond, Virginia, United States · 2003 · expanded 2026
The 2003 conservatory nearly doubled in size in 2026 and now includes a permanent butterfly house.
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Crystal Bridge Tropical Conservatory
🇺🇸 Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States · 1988
A cylindrical glass tube spanning downtown Oklahoma City, between rainforest and desert.
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Rainforest Pyramid (Moody Gardens)
🇺🇸 Galveston, Texas, United States · 1993
At 43 metres high, it is recognised by Guinness World Records as the largest pyramid-shaped greenhouse.
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Rainforest Conservatory (Fort Worth Botanic Garden)
🇺🇸 Fort Worth, Texas, United States · 1986
Closed in 2016, this 1986 tropical conservatory reopened in 2019 once a hundred panes of glass had been replaced and its misting overhauled.
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Lucile Halsell Conservatory, San Antonio Botanical Garden
🇺🇸 San Antonio, Texas, United States · 1988
A largely underground glasshouse from which only the glazed peaks emerge, and the first completed building by the architect Emilio Ambasz.
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Conservatory of the Two Sisters (New Orleans Botanical Garden)
🇺🇸 New Orleans, Louisiana, United States · 1930s · renovated and enlarged (completed by 2003)
A 1930s conservatory, born with City Park's Art Deco WPA garden, crowned by a glass dome 40 feet high.
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Birmingham Botanical Gardens Conservatory
🇺🇸 Birmingham, Alabama, United States · 1961-1962
A Lord & Burnham conservatory of 1962, now a rarity, designed by the curator of the Montreal Botanical Garden.
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The West
San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego, Las Vegas, Denver: the West runs from the Victorian Conservatory of Flowers to Amazon's Spheres and Biosphere 2 in the Arizona desert.
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Conservatory of Flowers
🇺🇸 San Francisco, United States · 1878–1879
Rebuilt plank by plank after the 1995 storm.
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Osher Rainforest (California Academy of Sciences)
🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States · 2008
Beneath the living roof of Renzo Piano's museum, a 27-metre glass sphere holds a tropical rainforest rising through four levels.
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Desert Garden Conservatory, The Huntington
🇺🇸 San Marino, California, United States · 1985
More than 2,200 cacti and succulents of 1,261 species and subspecies, sheltered at the heart of The Huntington's Desert Garden.
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Botanical Building, Balboa Park (lath house)
🇺🇸 San Diego, California, United States · 1914-1915
One of the largest lath structures in the world, built for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition and reopened in 2024 after a three-year restoration.
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Volunteer Park Conservatory
🇺🇸 Seattle, Washington, United States · 1912
A small Victorian Crystal Palace shipped "in kit form" in 1912, still standing on Capitol Hill.
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The Spheres (Amazon Spheres)
🇺🇸 Seattle, Washington, United States · 2018
At the foot of an office tower, three glass spheres hold more than 40,000 plants from the world's cloud forests.
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W. W. Seymour Botanical Conservatory (Wright Park)
🇺🇸 Tacoma, Washington, United States · 1908
Paid for by a 10,000-dollar gift, it is one of only three Victorian-style conservatories on the American West Coast.
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Bellagio Conservatory & Botanical Gardens
🇺🇸 Las Vegas (Paradise), Nevada, United States · 1998
A conservatory under 50 feet of glass, replanted five times a year inside a Strip hotel-casino and visited free by some 20,000 people a day.
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Biosphere 2
🇺🇸 Oracle, Arizona, United States · 1987–1991
Over 12,000 m² under glass holding rainforest, coral ocean, mangrove, savanna and desert, sealed for two years from 1991.
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Boettcher Memorial Tropical Conservatory
🇺🇸 Denver, Colorado, United States · 1966
Its interlocking concrete arches form a petrified forest before visitors even step inside the tropical conservatory.
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1157 botanical and historic greenhouses, across 76 countries, organized by continent in the complete catalogue.
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